The popular forms of mobile VR headsets, such as the Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream View and Cardboard, are currently limited to rotational head tracking, meaning that you can look around comfortably from a single vantage point, but movements of the head through 3D space (like leaning forward or backward) cannot be tracking. Positional tracking adds not only comfort but also immersion to virtual reality, and is a feature of all major tethered VR headsets. However, achieving the same on mobile VR has proved challenging.

As a highly desirable feature for mobile VR headsets, positional tracking has been a priority for Oculus’ internal development for a long time, and various alternative solutions such as VicoVR and Univrses are beginning to appear. While the future points to self-contained, ‘inside-out’ tracking, already found on Microsoft’s Mixed Reality headsets and Google’s Tango technology, Utah State University students Brady Riddle and Sam Jungertat have created a positional tracking solution for Gear VR that uses Valve’s well-proven SteamVR Tracking system.

Three infrared sensors, detecting the flashes from an HTC base station (Lighthouse technology), are attached to the front of the Gear VR headset and connected to a microcontroller, which collects the timing data. The data is sent to a computer via UDP packet over Wi-Fi, and the results are displayed using the game engine Unity, as shown in the brief demonstration video heading this article.

Though this project was academic in nature, it does point to one potential solution for positional tracking on mobile VR headsets—a system which would use rotational tracking as a baseline, but then be able to add positional tracking via the SteamVR Tracking technology when at home and near base stations.

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This is an ultra-cheap solution compatible with already set-up Lighthouses. That’s what.

OgreTactics

Look, another student nobody doing the job of corporations!

Leo Richard Comerford

Now, a relatively polished version of this for attaching to Oculus Go could do some serious damage. Head-to-head positionally-tracked multi-user VR for $200 plus the cost of the tracker per head, plus the cost of a few SteamVR Tracking base stations (as little as one base station for many seated-VR configurations)…